


Be Calm

by Shayvaalski



Series: The Kids Are Alright [7]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BBC Sherlock - Freeform, Blood, Gen, Kid Fic, Mental Health Issues, Parentlock, Post Reichenbach, Series, Suicide Attempt, moran family values, seb moran: minder of highly sensitive people, the kids are alright, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-29
Updated: 2013-01-29
Packaged: 2017-11-27 09:26:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/660369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shayvaalski/pseuds/Shayvaalski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Siobhan Moran takes as well to Uni as could possibly be expected.</p><p> </p><p>Warnings for attempted suicide, and blood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Be Calm

**Author's Note:**

> If you find suicide attempts triggering, and you're reading this as a series, you can click the End Notes for a summary of Relevant Plot Points.

Siobhan is asleep and Sebastian half an hour gone when Mr. Moran calls. Tommy jerks upright. First glance goes to the bed, too-pale skin and loose dark hair and—please, god—the rise and fall of breath. Second is to the locked door and third the ringing phone. 

Mr. Moran never calls. Never Tommy’s mobile and rarely Siobhan’s, and he picks it up slowly, thumbs the button, tucks it between chin and shoulder. 

“Sir?”

“Hello, boy.” There is a rasp to Jim’s voice but it’s still all blood and calfskin gloves. “Sebastian is somehow _neglecting_ to pick up his phone and the emergency kit appears to be missing. _Please_ don’t hesitate to fill me in.” 

Tommy sits down in the desk chair, picks up a pen to toy with. Puts it down. Doesn’t take his eyes off Siobhan, the tight curl of her spine, the sheet pulled over her shoulder. 

“Mr. Moran—” Tom presses his hand to his mouth, unconsciously adult, then to his forehead, leaning on it. On the other end silence; Jim will, he knows, give him enough rope to hang himself with, always and forever, before he says a word. “Hnh. Jim.” He hears the little start, the sudden shift in how the phone is held; Tommy has never called Mr. Moran by his first name, never in nine years. He closes his eyes. 

“Sir. Siobhan is—she’s fine, Mr. Moran, she’s sleeping, Sebastian made sure—”

Jim says nothing, but he says it dynamically. Tommy gives in. 

“She tried to kill herself.”

Tom waits. There’s a long slow indrawn hiss of breath. Jim’s voice when it comes is softer than he expects, strained and not quite gentle. There’s a shift of fabric, the sound of pacing, and Tommy can tell he’s in the kitchen by the sound of it, knows absently and with the certainly of years of drilling.

“How?”

Tommy tilts his head back (like Sebastian had an hour ago, in pain and sick relief, neck a smooth line) and makes a small abortive gesture. “Cuts across both wrists, no veins severed but nearly—” he does not think he imagines the sound Jim makes “—mild dehydration. An attempted overdose on painkillers, but I’m careful about how many are in the room, and she didn’t get far with the knife, I came home—” Tommy is babbling; he knows he is, knows he will pay for it, he’d worked so _hard_ to be calm on the phone with Sebastian. 

Jim’s voice cuts him off clean and cold. A tremor slides down Tommy’s back, and he remembers blood on the tips of handmade black leather shoes, sitting at the kitchen table with Siobhan a year after he can no longer imagine anything but being what he is and watching Sebastian touch the hard lines of Mr. Moran’s neck and back.

“Why?”

“I don’t...” Tommy cannot lie to Mr. Moran. Cannot avoid the subject like he had with Sebastian. “There’s a girl, sir. Threw Siobhan over, I think. Don’t have much information, she’s not—Siobhan hasn’t been talking much.” He straightens in his chair. This is a test like every other one Mr. Moran and Sebastian has set him. Tommy has to think of it like that or he won’t be able to manage, he’s only just nineteen. “Rumors’ve been starting. About Siobhan, and what Amy’s been calling her, and it’s... well. Not good. _Something_ happened.” 

Tommy waits, mobile pressed to his ear; he can hear the tap of Jim’s fingertips against the kitchen table, the shallow belling of his breath, and he is suddenly afraid. Mr. Moran’s wrists are overlaid with pale flat scars, and Sebastian is god knows where—

“Mr. Moran,” he says again, a little desperate. “She’s fine, Sebastian came and she’s sleeping, properly even, not just passed out, I’m sorry I couldn’t be—that I didn’t stop her in time, sir.”

A laugh, dry and soft; a laugh that is almost a gasp. “You are _extremely_ young. I should not have expected it of you, not at this juncture. I take it you’re with her?”

“Couldn’t make me leave.” Tommy’s eyes go to Siobhan, and god, _why._

“I’ll be with you both shortly. If you leave her side, Tommy, I will _know_ , and you won’t enjoy the consequences. Not that you’ll be enjoying them anyway, but this way you’ll keep everything I deem important.”

Tommy sags with something like relief as the line goes dead. Gets up, crosses to the bed. Siobhan is unmoving except for the rise of her chest, and the fall of it, wrists tucked up against her collarbone, white gauze against skin that is barely darker. He smoothes her hair and she makes a soft noise, stirs a little towards him.

“Saoiste,” he murmurs, and then—sod this, damn it to hell and back—Tommy climbs into bed beside her, arm over her hips, and Christ, she is thin. Siobhan moves a little more, pressing into his body, and he pulls her close as gently as he can. One long-fingered hand eases down to cover his, and Siobhan’s shoulders heave and shake, just once.

Ná bás, he lets himself think for the first time all day, grim and afraid. Please. _Just don’t die._ She’s not quite awake and she’s not quite asleep, and so she doesn’t object when Tommy presses his mouth to the crown of her head. Siobhan murmurs something that he doesn’t catch, isn’t even sure is actually words, and then she’s falling back down into sleep, her breath shallow. 

There is blood on the carpet behind him, and Tommy knows in a few minutes he is going to have to start cleaning it; already there is the sharp familiar scent of ammonia soaking into the pile, making it easier to blot up (Sebastian grim-faced, pouring a mixture of it and cold water carefully over the place he’d found Siobhan) and at least the carpet is dark and patterned. Student housing. They expect a mess. It’s not a problem.

Tommy gives himself six minutes to listen to Siobhan breathe, and then he gets up, methodical and careful and aching with fear, to lay towels over her diluted blood. He isn’t a stranger to this, but usually it’s animal or his own, or sometimes Sebastian’s; and Tommy hears Seb saying, grimly amused, _At least she didn’t bother to do any research before she got down to business_ , red soaking into the knees of his jeans. 

*** 

When he hears someone coming down the hall to their room she is still breathing, and that is all Tommy cares about right now; but the tread is unmistakable, and if he just lets Jim open the door onto the scent of blood it’s not going to go well for anyone. He glances over at Siobhan. She doesn’t move except the rise and fall of her chest. Tommy has never seen her be within fifteen feet of Jim without her echoing him, and his step is just outside the door. He stares down at his hands, streaked with red, then before Mr. Moran can even touch the knob Tommy has the door open and his wide shoulders blocking it. 

“Move.” 

There is no hint that this is a suggestion. Tommy doesn’t stir. Mr. Moran actually _snarls_ , which he didn’t really think was possible outside of dogs, and Tommy does not even let himself flinch. Jim’s hand comes up, automatic, the same way he’s seen it come up just before Sebastian ducks and lunges and catches his man across the middle, slamming him into a wall or the kitchen counter—just before he and Siobhan quietly remove themselves from the house. 

Tommy trusts Siobhan to catch Jim’s hand. 

Siobhan is unconscious fifteen feet away, back to the door. 

Mr. Moran does not touch him. 

“She’s sleeping,” says Tommy, finally, in the same instant that Jim’s fist drops back down to his side, the man’s whole body a shimmer of barely-contained rage. “She’s sleeping and it took a sodding age to get her bandaged and settled and you are _not_ waking her up.” A beat. “Sir.”

“ _Move.”_ He presses the word out through clenched teeth. 

Tommy resists the urge to look over his shoulder at Siobhan, to make sure she is still sleeping or to find some cue to follow. Instead he looks at Mr. Moran, blue eyes half-shut and as bland as they will go. 

“She’s my daughter, boy. I have a right. Move. Now.” A third time, and Tommy licks his lips, which are suddenly very dry. Mr. Moran has frightened him since the beginning, even after seeing Siobhan (just a tiny little thing, not even ten) press up against his hip like she can’t imagine doing anything else, take his hand without the prompting she needs from Sebastian. 

Tommy crosses his arms, playing at being calm as anything, thinking of Sebastian—who he is learning slowly to think of as his dad, who he resembles more than he resembles anyone in his first family—standing impassive in doorways almost all his life. “No.”

It’s the first time he’s said it properly, out loud, and Mr. Moran actually _laughs,_ horrible and high. Tommy can feel his skin trying to crawl right off the back of his neck, and he allows himself to rub at it, once, before recrossing his arms. Jim’s fingers are splayed against his chest, suddenly, and he _does not flinch._ He’s learned that much, anyway, from Siobhan. 

“I said now.”

“Sir.” Tommy keeps his voice flat, nearly blank. “I do what I’m told. But you’re not the one who can tell me.”

For a long moment he thinks Jim is actually going to pull a knife; the fingers of his free hand twitch towards his sleeve in a way Tommy doesn’t like at all. In a way he knows, intimately, from being rushed up against a wall by a woman who is becoming so like Mr. Moran they could be twins, instead of mother and daughter. But no knife appears. Instead Jim’s mouth thins, and he smoothes a hand down the front of his blazer. Reflexive. Repetitive. If Tommy didn’t know better he’d say _afraid._ If Jim had it in him, to be afraid. 

Tommy is terribly, grimly afraid, and if he lets it show then it he knows (like he knows the location of his right hand, of his gun, of Siobhan) that Mr. Moran will be on him without mercy. Even if he has never dared before, watched too closely by his daughter and his man. 

So he does not show it. And Jim does not lunge. 

“Come back later,” Tommy says, and steps back into the room, closing the door nearly halfway before Mr. Moran grips the edge of it. His eyes are all pupil. When Siobhan gets like this, Tommy has learned how to stay close to her, close enough that she cannot get the force or speed or leverage to hurt him more badly than he can stand. She is—thank god—not as bad as Mr. Moran, or at least not as often and Tommy will take what he can get. He doesn’t envy Sebastian his scars, although he understands he will wear his own, in time. 

Jim drums his fingers against his thigh. “Last chance, O’Doyle,” he says, almost brightly, and his accent is tinged with a parody of Tommy’s farmboy vowels. When Mr. Moran gets casual, gets relaxed, gets _cheerful,_ it almost always ends with someone’s blood smeared against the wall.

Sebastian isn’t here, so Tommy slams the door, and locks it. He puts his back to the wood; even through the solid thickness he can hear an indrawn hiss of rage. A hand cracking against it, palm flat and fingers splayed. There wasn’t another choice. He has to believe that. Tommy is Siobhan’s man and he will keep her safe and keep her alive if he has to kill or die to do it. 

Tommy is not sure you can love a Moriarty. But he crosses the room anyway to where she is stirring, half-roused by the string of curses and sound of pacing feet outside the door, and sits down on the bed. Strokes a hand over long dark hair, over the braid Tommy learned how to do for her when he was twelve and Siobhan ten. 

“Tommy?” Her voice is blurred. 

“Here, saoiste.”

“Is my mum—?” Siobhan’s up on one elbow now, and he presses her down, gently. 

“He’s outside.” Tommy says it reluctantly, but he does say it. “He’s in a hell of a temper, Siobhan. I wouldn’t let him in.”

She looks at him, brown-eyed, then reaches for him. He expects a blow, would understand if she hit him, but instead Siobhan’s hand curls against Tommy’s jawline and then falls away, as if she doesn’t have the strength to hold it there. “Good boy,” Siobhan says, distant, and then she is asleep again, chest rising and falling so shallowly that for a moment Tommy’s heart stops. But it’s just sleep. 

Mr. Moran stays outside in the corridor all night, pacing.

Tommy does not go to bed. 

And in the morning they are all of them still alive, and Tommy opens the door.

**Author's Note:**

> As per usual [Blue](andthebluestblue.tumblr.com) was an enormous help on this, and provided corrections to Tommy's voice. 
> 
> As you may have noticed there is a big time jump here; don't worry, there are still fics coming in the in-between years (from Blue as well maybe :D), and then after that we get into some Oh My God Actual Plot? which should be fun. 
> 
> Plot points: 
> 
> Siobhan is thrown over by a girl, and reacts badly; she attempts suicide, which Tommy interrupts. Sebastian helps him put her back together, and Jim is severely not pleased—he does his best to descend on Tommy and put him in his place. Tommy refuses to be put.


End file.
